Unfinished Desires (37 page)

Well, in less than two hours it would be over. The actors would be mingling with parents and guests in the main parlor. In her weekly phone calls to her mother, Maud had kept mum about the play; she was too afraid they might decide to come, and then Art Foley would have to be introduced as her new father. She had more important things to think about right now. She had risked telling this to Mother Ravenel, who’d agreed, which Maud took as a good sign. It meant that even though the headmistress had yet to see signs of a sprouting vocation, she was already regarding her as separate from her family, which is what Maud would be if she—

Curiously, her absorption in her two roles, that of the nun who had crossed the sea with her best friend to found schools and that of the girl who chose not to take the veil because her best friend had come between her and God, had reduced Maud’s scruples about latent deceitfulness in herself. They were all playing the game to win, Mother Ravenel, herself, and Tildy, and when the game was over she might or might not have committed herself in return for three more years at Mount St. Gabriel’s. And even if she did announce her “intention,” it wasn’t set in stone: look at Antonia, whose conscience had made her abandon hers.

Maud paused before the foundress’s cross.

Elizabeth Mary Wallingford
O.S.S.
1863–1930
Professed February 10, 1893

“Yes, I have been you, a little,” Maud addressed the grave. “And now it’s almost time to go backstage and in your name turn down Gilda Gomez’s offer to set me up with a school for young ladies on the Wallingford estate. I’ll have to tell the squire that I can’t accept because ‘the world does not need any more schools, Father, to teach girls how to stay home and do needlework and play the piano and manage the servants.’ And then I’ll go to Cowley with my poor spurned clergyman to hear the famous preaching of Father Maturin (Beatrix does a great job of belting out his lines in an English accent).”

On the road above, Jovan’s grandson Mark, wearing a suit and tie, ran toward the auditorium, an extension cord clutched in his hand. Mark was doing the lighting and was in charge of operating the tape recorder with God’s voice on it.

“Well, Mother Wallingford, I’m going in now, wearing your cloak. And under the cloak, I have on Granny’s nightgown, which will do for your deathbed scene in act two—just a bit of white collar peeking above the counterpane. And under that I am wearing an actual dress belonging to Antonia Tilden—for the scene between Domenica and Rexanne, when Domenica writes something in an old exam book and hands it over to be read aloud by Suz—Rexanne.

“Help me to convey your true spirit, Mother, as it really was. And if you have a chance, put in a word for me with God. He doesn’t seem interested in my dilemma. Maybe because—could it be that the whole thing is just playacting on my part?”

MOTHER RAVENEL STOOD
up from her reserved front seat and rang a piercing little handbell.

“Good evening … good evening, everyone. On behalf of Reverend Mother Barrington and the entire faculty of Mount St. Gabriel’s, I’d like to welcome parents, friends, and townspeople to the academy’s final play of the school year. As many of you know, the freshman play is always the last, that is one of our traditions, and the play the girls will be presenting tonight has become a kind of tradition, too. As you will see in your program,
The Red Nun
was first presented by the freshman class of 1931. Tonight will mark its fifth revival by a freshman class. Another tradition that has grown up around this particular play is that each class may add its own material. In that way, each revival gives it new life. And now, everyone, please just sit back and enjoy—and the freshman class will do the rest.”

All right, that’s enough
, thought Cornelia.
You’ve shown how modest you are—when your name is right there at the top of the program as the person who wrote the play. Sit the hell down
.

The house lights dimmed and out swept Elaine Frew in her wonderful dress. She sat down at the piano below the stage, fiddled importantly with the knobs of her bench, then, as though silently counting to ten, rested her hands loosely on her lap before launching into the overture she had just finished composing this afternoon: a fetching weave of Bach partita, the Mount St. Gabriel’s school song, and the flute overture her mother had composed for the 1931 premiere of
The Red Nun
.

A sigh of appreciation rippled through the audience: at least the music was going to be first-rate.

Music is everything
, thought Elaine, serenely spotlit on her island of melody.
It shuts people up, it lifts them out of their boring selves—it is superior to all the other arts
.

A small girl with masses of flame-red hair slipped through the curtain parting and stood quietly in the apron while the piano notes dropped to a diminuendo. The spotlight shifted from Elaine to this girl in her black velvet dress with lace collar.

The music ceased, and Becky Meyer began to speak in her precise and rather impersonal voice: “We are here in the high mountains of North Carolina, but we must travel far back in time to tell you how we have come to be here.”

She waited in a poised silence that went on a little too long for comfort before a sepulchral bass voice blared from behind the curtain:

“I … smashed …
con
-ti-nents … together … to … make … these
moun
-tains.… Sent
hun
-dreds of
mil
-lions of years of my wind and my rain … and
pol
-ished them with
my gla
-ciers …”

Someone backstage had quickly lowered the volume.
Mistake! Mistake!
thought Cornelia, wincing.
John sounds like someone doing a
parody
of “The Shadow knows.” I should have listened to it myself and stopped it. But Smoky said it was all right and Tildy had worked so hard on the phrasing with John. If I had listened, I would have talked Tildy out of it, but who has time to run a business and listen to one’s child’s every brainstorm? Well, it’s almost over, and then we have the spooky little prologue song Francine Barfoot wrote in 1931. Francine certainly looks well put together, though who wouldn’t with all that Frew money—besides which, she doesn’t have a career
.

“If you go out walking in our dark wood
When the hawk’s face is tucked beneath his wing
And the mist has risen in the hollows
And the owl shrieks:
Do not shrink if on your path
You meet a solitary ghost.
Ask it, ‘What did you love most?
And what have you left undone?’

Until her husband elbowed her, Mrs. Yount didn’t realize she had been humming along with her daughter up there on the stage. Mavis Yount had so thoroughly ingested that song that she sang it in her sleep.

“You don’t know what is in you till you try.”

The stately girl playing Elizabeth Wallingford, accompanied by her thwarted clergyman suitor (Hansje Van Kleek wearing her father’s dark suit), was listening spellbound to Father Maturin, played by Beatrix Wynkoop, preaching in a priest’s borrowed cassock against a forest backdrop.

“Dis-con-tent may be God’s catapult, His way of prodding you … ‘Go and try yourself now!’

Beatrix’s reading of the English priest’s lines was masterly.

MOTHER FINNEY, UPSTAIRS
in the balcony with the majority of the nuns, was, as always, dreading the “infirmary deathbed” scene in the second act of the play, but after having consulted her program had found herself pleasantly curious to see how this production was going to do without the “ocean crossing.” And now that they had reached the last scene of the first act, in which “Elizabeth” and “Fiona” were walking in the woods, she understood and admired the cleverness and economy of it. Surely God was to be praised when even this wearisome adolescent play could be changed for the better by later adolescent girls.

What these girls had done was to take the gist of the dialogue of the two nuns at the ship’s railing—a dialogue that had never existed except in Suzanne Ravenel’s young imagination. If truth be told, which it hadn’t, Lizzie had spent the entire voyage below in their cabin, sick as a dog, while she, Fiona, stood at the rail all by herself, thinking, What is this we have done? Were we mad to cross the sea? What these ninth-grade girls had done was to move the dialogue back to the time in Oxford when they were not yet professed but defining and planning their great adventure—and emboldening each other.

Even with her growing deafness she could hear that some of her St. Patrick’s Day talk with young Chloe, Agnes’s daughter, in the greenhouse had found its way into the script. Chloe must have taken her advice and checked out
Adventures with Our Foundress
from the school library. From what Mother Finney could hear, which was by no means everything, they had kept Suzanne’s overall scheme and momentum but mixed in lines from
Adventures with Our Foundress
—things Lizzie had actually said. Though, generously, the girls had bestowed an equal amount of the dialogue’s wisdom on “Fiona.”

WALLINGFORD:
We can do this, Fiona. The three of us can do this.

FINNEY:
Indeed, the three of us can.

WALLINGFORD:
The Holy Ghost will be blowing us onward, just as he did the Apostles in Acts. As long as we keep faith with holy daring.

FINNEY:
Which is when you let yourself be guided by divine improvisation—

WALLINGFORD:
Which is being in service to a work larger than yourself—

FINNEY:
And being of one heart with others who belong together with you in that work.

The two girls paced eagerly back and forth in front of the woodland backdrop, the one wearing Lizzie’s old cloak, the other Fiona’s old riding boots.

And being of one heart with others who belong together with you in that work
. Close to tears, Mother Finney found herself vigorously nodding,
yes, yes
.

MOTHER ARBUCKLE, THE
infirmarian, had been hoping to have a word with Dr. Galvin during the intermission, but he was occupied with the Cuban fathers. She would catch up with him at the reception after the play.
(“Doctor, I’ve taken down a health history of Mother Kate Malloy, which I’d like to pass on to you. When she was nine she contracted streptococcal sore throat followed by acute bronchitis with high fever and was kept out of school for five weeks. The day she arrived at Mount St. Gabriel’s, she fainted, but there have been no more episodes since, though she says she is sometimes lightheaded and feels a lack of stamina. She has trouble sleeping at night except in a raised position, then falls asleep at odd times during the day. Also she eats very
little; the school diet doesn’t agree with her. I was wondering about some tests to rule out possible early heart damage.”)

“I DON’T KNOW
about you two,” Cornelia said to her husband and Henry Vick in the lobby, “but I am bowled over by Tildy’s streamlining of Suzanne’s tired old pageant. Of course, I’ve been in on it with her from the start, but I must admit I didn’t expect it to be this lively.”

“It sure does move along,” agreed Tildy’s father. “Though I never saw the original. I hadn’t even met Cornelia in 1931, much less imagined a Tildy in my future. But you saw it, Henry. How does it compare?”

“I missed a lot of it—I was nervous for my sister. She was playing Fiona Finney and was terrified that Mother Finney would be offended.”

“Yes, Agnes did adore her dear Finney,” Cornelia reflected, adding, with a touch of malice, “I know if I had been Finney, there were parts I could have done without. Especially that melodrama in the infirmary, which Tildy agreed with me needed to be toned down.”

“And Father hadn’t built the auditorium yet,” Henry said. “The girls performed their plays on a platform stage in the old ballroom. Everything was right there in front of you, with no backdrop or curtain. The mistakes were more noticeable.”

“Where has Madeline disappeared to?” Cornelia sounded as though she’d just remembered she had another daughter.

“She was going down to the dressing room to see if Tildy needed anything,” said Henry, wondering why he should feel suddenly so bereft. It seemed to arise out of the evening’s concatenation of events: Mother Ravenel recalling to him that his father’s Sheraton sideboard had been used in
Charley’s Aunt;
his little sister, Agnes, with her early crushes and later loves, buried under a Barlow gravestone with half her history missing from it. And Antonia gone, leaving behind her acerbic identical twin to remind him, year after year, how Antonia would look as she aged. There was some other element, but he could not catch hold of it. Perhaps something to do with Madeline. How she took care of people, gave herself over to what was needed—like driving Chloe to Barlow and back—and seemed to want nothing in particular for herself.

“Listen, Henry.” Cornelia linked her arm through his. “Let’s you and I switch seats when we go back in. I want to sit next to the Ravenel and see how she responds to the rest of the play.”

CHAPTER 32
Act Two

THE HOUSE LIGHTS
went down. The pianist glided to her instrument, and an elfin figure in a long-sleeved blouse and tights and a knee-length silver jerkin materialized in front of the curtain. A single F-sharp was struck, and the girl sang without further accompaniment into the semidarkness.

“I am the spirit of this school
I am the one who remembers the true.
I am who safeguards what’s really you.”

Nita Judd felt her arms prickle at this wisp of a granddaughter with a voice like spun glass. Bless lovely Elaine Frew and bossy little Tildy Stratton for befriending poor Jiggsie and making her shine!

Now Elaine came in with a series of minor chords followed by some portentous tremolondos, and then Jiggsie’s choirboy countertenor soared off on its own again.

“Stories and legends have been told
Some more recent, others old;
Each had its motive, each its hour,
Each contributed to someone’s power.
But I am the spirit who sifts and sorts
I am the one unafraid to report:
I am the friend who never will tire
Of showing you what actually transpired.”

That child’s voice is just uncanny
, thought Mother Ravenel, in her left-front-row seat alongside the Stratton and Vick family party.

How smart of Tildy to create this part for Jiggsie: the Spirit of the School, who remembers what’s gone before and safeguards the genuine person in each of us. That is what Mount St. Gabriel’s is all about. And being included so prominently in the class play has done wonders for Jiggsie’s morale. If she can just scrape by with a passing average, I will be able to write “Juliana is invited back” on her final report card and Nita Judd will let her board again next year, and everyone will have benefited. It is always a risk to put a girl back a grade, though in this case it seems to have worked, for which I thank You, Lord
.

But, now, what was this bit about: “Each contributed to someone’s power”? “Glory” would have been a more appropriate word—but then, of course, it wouldn’t have rhymed with “hour.”

When a smiling Cornelia had sat down next to Mother Ravenel after the intermission and offered warm compliments on the play, unadulterated by a single caustic note, the headmistress had gotten the definite feeling that she was at last being forgiven for having been loved by Cornelia’s sister, Antonia. Had her act of giving Tildy the directorship of the play finally convinced Cornelia that she was not the family’s enemy?

It had been a risk, just as it had been a risk to put Nita Judd’s granddaughter back a grade. But Mother Malloy’s suggestion that Tildy needed larger outlets for her leadership qualities had spurred the headmistress to take that chance.

And so far things were surpassing expectations. This production, so far,
was
“both professional and lively” (Cornelia’s own words). Although in Mother Ravenel’s opinion, some changes hadn’t needed to be made. Why, for instance, dispense with the lovely scene of the nuns crossing the ocean when at last the school had a professional ocean drop?

But now Becky Meyer, in her beautiful black velvet with the Belgian lace collar, had replaced Jiggsie in front of the curtain and was narrating how Elizabeth had become a Catholic and the two friends were professed as nuns, opened a school in Oxfordshire, were invited by the Benedictines in America to establish their teaching order there, and how, after successfully launching their academy in Boston, they heard from Father Maturin that greater challenges awaited them in the Appalachians, and, “charged by the Holy Ghost,” they took the train to Mountain City, where they discovered that a hotel was up for sale.

Of course, Mother Finney’s chapbook, with Elizabeth’s “Charged by the
Holy Ghost” in its appendix, didn’t exist when I was writing my play—she was still working on it!—but Chloe told me Mother Finney had said they might want to look at the chapbook if they needed more material. I strongly urged them to do this. And now the curtain is rising on the auction scene and Cornelia beside me has flashed me a very friendly “Here we go!” smile
.

MOTHER MALLOY, NEXT
to Mother Finney in the balcony, wished she could read the old nun’s thoughts as she watched her younger self and a younger Elizabeth Wallingford being portrayed by Chloe Starnes and Maud Norton. At the moment, “Mother Wallingford,” confident and statuesque in her cloak, was bidding for all the furniture. Ashley Nettle as Auctioneer managed to convey both rural suspiciousness and awe of this English nun.

AUCTIONEER:
But … madam, that’s eighty furnished bedrooms alone, in addition to the public rooms. What are you going to do with all that furniture? How will you move it?

WALLINGFORD:
I’m not going to move it. It will stay where it is.

AUCTIONEER:
But … madam, this hotel is up for sale. The furniture will
have
to be moved.

WALLINGFORD:
Not if I buy the hotel, it doesn’t.

The gangster-style riposte had Tildy’s mark all over it. A gust of laughter rippled through the audience. A dry little chuckle erupted from Mother Finney herself.

Mother Malloy wondered what actually had been said by the English foundress that day in 1909. (And surely there must have been other bidders present.) Mother Finney, the only living bearer of the community’s memory, most likely remembered, but tonight she was simply being an old nun in the balcony.

(“Each class is an organism,” Mother Ravenel had asserted categorically last autumn when, fresh off the train from Boston, Mother Malloy was being given the tour of the grounds and hearing troubling accounts about “her” upcoming ninth grade. “Yes, a class is never just a collection of individual girls, though it is certainly
that
, too, when you’re considering one girl at a time. But a class as a whole develops a group consciousness. It’s an organic unit, with its own special properties. … They are a challenging group, those girls. They will require control.”)

But just before Christmas break, Mother Ravenel appeared to have reached new conclusions all by herself. (“What I’m seeing in your ninth grade are
several
clusters of girls, each with its sphere of interests. I don’t see a nucleus of main girls anymore. I wonder whether, if a Mrs. Prince situation arose today, this class as it is now constituted could drive her off. What I think is, the breakup of Tildy and Maud and the influx of new girls has created new patterns and diluted old forces.”)

This evening, Mother Malloy had prayed in the chapel for each performer in the play, from Andreu through Yount, calling up each face and the progress of that girl’s year to date. And there had been wonderful instances of progress—witness jittery, scattered Ashley Nettle’s humorous mastery of her role as Auctioneer.

And now, the curtain falling on the purchased hotel, Mother Malloy applauded with the rest of the audience and then closed her eyes and looked ahead toward her nightly examen:

Where have I, so far today, discerned God’s presence?

One: in this play. I see Your presence in the joyful, sustained efforts of sixteen girls, counting our recently acquired Jiggsie. For me, their presentation embodies what the two young nuns in the last act were setting out to do: to be of service to a work larger than themselves and to be of one heart with those engaged in it. And that message, coming down from our foundress through Mother Ravenel’s old script, revised and respoken by these present ninth graders, has given me new insight into my vocation.

Two: I felt Your presence this afternoon in the heedful and caring attentions of Mother Arbuckle, my sister in Christ, who summoned me for a vitamin B shot and then gave me tea while she took notes on my childhood illnesses.

“There could have been some scarring of the mitral valves during that bout of fever when you were nine, Mother. I want to send you to Dr. Galvin for tests, dear. It’s just a shot in the dark on my part—I’m probably being overcautious because I worry about you—but it’s best we rule it out.”

“But what if your shot in the dark should prove right on the mark?”

“The doctor would probably recommend to Reverend Mother that you be transferred back to New England at the end of the school year. The heart has to work so much harder at this altitude, which may account for your discomfort at night, your want of energy, and your meager appetite. Astonishing breakthroughs are being made every day in cardiovascular medicine, and if it turns out you do have a problem, you’ll do better at sea level until you can have it fixed in Boston, with all its excellent hospitals. I would miss you, as all of us would, but you’re of more use to God when you’re feeling your best. Would you mind it very much?”

“When Reverend Mother ordered me to break off my graduate work and take the train to Mountain City, I must tell you, I did mind it. But I had known, from the day I put on my ring, that my ‘minding’ something was going to be beside the point for the rest of my life, and that I had chosen this. I think you know what I mean: our first meeting, when you told me how you decided not to turn on the car radio on your way to the hospital and how the connection with God was made in that first silence? Well, the practice closest to me now, the practice I find central to everything I do, is living every day and night as fully as I can in consultancy with God. The questions I ask and the insights that come out of the listening—I’m not saying this very well—but the more I live this way, the more I want to—to—
pray my life
rather than stumble through it.”

“Ah, so you’ve got there, too,” said the infirmarian. “Now I’m going to miss you more than ever. But let’s hope I’m being overcautious. Then we can go on having these conversations.”

THE CURTAIN ROSE
on the classroom side of Henry Vick’s twelve-foot reversible flat, framed by the blue cyclorama behind it. Chloe had painted exact copies of the Gothic Revival windows that the academy girls in their classrooms had gazed out of since the opening of the school.

Josie Galvin, in the St. Scholastica habit, hands folded nunlike on her desk, praised the two girls who had stayed after class to make up some work. She let herself be coaxed into telling the history of the school’s first years. How the foundress and her teachers had to overcome local anti-Catholic sentiment:

NUN:
They say a Mountain City man jumped off the streetcar when he saw two nuns from our Order getting on.

GIRLS:
No! Really, Mother?

NUN
: So the story goes. But we must keep in mind that stories are often invented to point up the underlying state of things.

But that story is true
, thought Maud, waiting in the wings in Granny’s white nightgown for the upcoming infirmary scene.
The man who jumped off the streetcar was my own grandfather Roberts, who died before I was born. He’d turn over in his grave if he knew what I have led Mother Ravenel to think I might do to stay on at the school he wouldn’t let my mother attend. Would Lily Roberts’s life have been different if she had been a Mount St. Gabriel’s girl? Would I even exist?

Inexplicably, inconveniently, Maud suddenly missed her mother.

Now Josie Galvin was relating to the girls the history of the unfinished statue in the grotto: Caroline DuPree’s death before she could take vows, and then the death of the sculptor before he could finish her memorial. The mothers of Mikell Lunsford and Lora Jean Cramer earnestly mimed their daughters’ responses, then merrily elbowed each other when they realized they were doing it. The mothers were proud of the authenticity of their girls’ 1920s costumes, exhumed from family cedar chests and lovingly refitted and refurbished. Unfortunately, neither father could be at the Friday night performance. Mr. Lunsford had not yet returned from his week on the road for Electrolux, and Mr. Cramer (“Why the dickens can’t they hold their things on a Saturday like the parochial school did?”) was working his usual weekday evening shift as train dispatcher.

THE CURTAIN FELL
on the classroom scene and Mark and Jovan hastened onstage to remove the desk and chairs, carried out the ghost girl’s bench, reversed the new flat so it was now the grotto, and set in place an awkwardly shaped last-minute prop supposed to represent the Red Nun. Some fresh white paint transferred itself to the lapel of Mark’s only suit, and he silently mouthed a ferocious stream of cuss words.

Marta Andreu, in her mother’s wedding dress, her face covered with her own confirmation veil, entered stage right and began her ghostlike float toward her bench. (“You want to move
como una fantasma,”
Tildy had directed her. “Because that’s what you are: the ghost of someone who’s no longer there but has to keep haunting the place that was important to her. Gilda, tell her to think of how a sleepwalker would walk:
como una sonámbula
.”)